Last year, during Covid-19, Amazon hired more than any other company around the world – 500,000 workers.  According to his annual shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos, said that there are now 200 million members of Amazon Prime around the world.  That is up 50 million just over one year and Amazon Prime costs $119 a year. 

Amazon says that approximately 60% of its sales are via small and mid-size businesses that sell products on Amazon and those companies earn between $25 and $39 billion selling products off Amazon last year. 

Bezos explained that Amazon has grown because it saves people time – customers complete 28% of purchases on Amazon in 3 minutes or less and they estimate that the typical trip to a store to go there physically takes about an hour and so Amazon estimates that it saves people about 75 hours a year of travelling back and forth to stores.  Obviously, this is relevant to any online shopping that you do – regardless of whether its Amazon or another site.

I am really disappointed at the slow vaccine roll-out that we have in South Africa.  I know that the major pharmaceutical drug companies will obviously favour the countries in which they are based, namely the USA and Europe, but I would think we could still have received more vaccines by now than we do.  I say this particularly because, as they always used to remind us in the Game of Thrones, winter is coming. 

Winter is indeed coming and with it we will see an increase in Covid-19 infections, because every other country experienced an increase during their winter.  In America their peak month of infections so far was exactly the middle of winter, being December, and if we project that onto SA we are probably looking at our worst month, for infections and deaths, being July this year.

The recent judgment in the case of the Road Accident Fund v The Legal Practice Council has given the Road Accident Fund some relief.  It allows the Road Accident Fund until September 2021 in any event to pay matters in order and without some attorneys jumping the queue and issuing writs.  You can now only issue a writ after 180 days have elapsed, again until September 2021, and the Road Accident Fund is undertaking to pay the majority of matters on 180 days going forward.  Our firm supported the RAF in this effort to stop some attorneys jumping the queue and we are favourably mentioned in the judgment by the Judges as having supported the RAF in this regard to prevent the implosion of the RAF. 

How long this new situation will last is another question.  Logically, if they did not have enough money to pay everything in the first place, just running out the time to 180 days is not really going to improve the situation much and one would expect that that 180 day timeframe eventually gets longer and longer and people will have to wait maybe 9 to 10 months for payment.

I was listening to a podcast the other day by Scott Galloway whose book, “The Four” I previously referred to in this blog.  He made a very important point and that is the way you are generally remembered is how you end a relationship.  It does not matter if everything went fantastically for 20 years if in the last 2 weeks it ends acrimoniously and in a nasty way. 

This applies not just to one’s intimate relationships and relationships with family, but he was actually talking about it in the context of a company.  He said it is so important to make sure, in those last few days at a company, that one can build a fantastic reputation or brand name and damage it in a week or two simply by ending a relationship badly.  It is as important as the efforts you put into the beginning of a relationship to put the same effort into the end of the relationship. 

Apple has really come out with a product that a lot of elderly people need - who seem to lose things all the time - and I am including myself!  It is a little button that at $29 each you connect your keys or your back pack and you will be able to find them on the Find My App.  It will allow you the option of playing a sound on the built-in speaker on the button, so you can follow the sound until you find what is hidden and it will also give you a little arrow on your phone pointing in the direction of where you should head and approximately how far away you are.  You will be able to use Siri to say things like, “Hey Siri, find my keys”.  I currently use my AppleWatch for a similar purpose – pinging my phone all the time to find out where I have lost my phone.  The whole system will not work very well for me if I cannot find my phone in the first place!